How to Write Dialogue That Sounds Real: Lessons from Hemingway, Carver, and Le Carré

Good dialogue doesn't transcribe real speech — it creates the illusion of it. Listen in on any café conversation and you'll hear hesitations, tangents, anecdotes that lead nowhere. Drop that verbatim into a novel and readers will put the book down. Literary dialogue is an artifact: compressed, directed, loaded with what isn't said. It should sound true, not be true.

Three writers pushed this craft to different extremes. Ernest Hemingway buried the essential under the surface: in Hills Like White Elephants (1927), an American man and a young woman discuss an "operation" that is never named — the word abortion appears nowhere in the story, and yet that's what the entire story is about. Raymond Carver, together with his editor Gordon Lish, sculpted by subtraction: the published version of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) is roughly half the length of the manuscript Carver turned in. And John le Carré made his spies speak in ways that gave them away; in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), the interrogator already knows the answer — he's only watching to see what the other man chooses to say.

Let's look at what each one teaches us, and then at the practical rules you can actually take to the page.

The iceberg theory: Hemingway and the art of omission

In Death in the Afternoon (1932), Hemingway laid out what became his theoretical signature:

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.

Applied to dialogue, this gives one simple rule: don't have characters say what they think. Have them say what slips out, or what they're actively trying to hide. Hills Like White Elephants is built entirely on this principle. The two characters talk about drinks, about hills that look like white elephants, about a "simple operation", about a bead curtain — and from these banalities the reader reconstructs a couple coming apart. The crucial information stays below the waterline.

The iceberg demands discipline. The writer has to know exactly what's happening beneath the surface — otherwise, in Hemingway's words, you only leave "hollow places" in the text. Allusive dialogue isn't a shortcut; it forces you to do more work, not less. You can only write the implicit well if you've already clarified the explicit in your notes.

Carver and the cut: what absence says

The editorial history of Raymond Carver is by now well documented. Gordon Lish, his editor at Knopf, cut nearly half of the manuscript of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and reshaped several stories with a razor. In the long version of "Beginners" (published posthumously in 2009 in the collection of the same name), the main character was named Herb; Lish renamed him Mel. The abusive boyfriend was Carl; he became Ed. Carver protested, then gave in. What we read is the Lish version — the one that founded what has been called, rightly or wrongly, American minimalism.

Who really invented that voice — Carver or Lish — is still debated. What matters here is what the cuts teach us about dialogue. The engine of "What We Talk About" is a kitchen-table conversation around a bottle of gin: four friends trying to say what love is, failing at it, and drinking more. The Lish version stripped out the explanations, the justifications, the pedagogical follow-ups. What remains is silence, short exchanges, rising drunkenness, fading light. The story works precisely because you can feel everything that's been removed.

The practical lesson: when a piece of dialogue isn't working, the temptation is to add to it. It's almost always the opposite move that fixes it. Cut the line that names the emotion. Cut the reply that lands too neatly. Cut half of the "yeah", "sure", "I see" noise that fills real conversation. Dialogue isn't a stenographic record — it's a score.

Le Carré and subtext: speaking to hide

Robert McKee puts it plainly in Dialogue: The Art of Verbal Action for the Page, Stage, and Screen (2016): a line of dialogue is an action. "To say something is to do something." Beneath every spoken line the character is pursuing a goal — to convince, to reassure, to humiliate, to extract. The text is what is said; the subtext is what the character is trying to get, or trying to hide.

No one illustrates this more starkly than John le Carré. In Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the great flashback scene shows George Smiley interrogating Karla, who will become his Soviet nemesis. Karla does not speak a word for the entire scene. The whole exchange is carried by Smiley's monologue, talking for two, and by the massive silence on the other side. Absent reply becomes reply.

From Le Carré we can extract a useful rule: in any scene of tension, ask what each character doesn't want to be known. That unspoken thing will structure the conversation. A spy who knows he's made is playing for time; an interrogator who already has the answer asks the question to watch the lie unfold. Working dialogue almost always involves someone lying, deflecting, concealing, or declining to say what they actually think.

"Said" is almost always enough: Elmore Leonard's discipline with tags

In July 2001, Elmore Leonard published his "10 Rules of Writing" in the New York Times. Three of them speak directly to dialogue:

Rule 3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. "The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in." In other words, "said" is almost always enough. "Growled", "hissed", "sighed", "whispered" draw the reader's eye to the tag and away from the line itself.

Rule 4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said". Leonard calls "he admonished gravely" a mortal sin: the adverb displaces the emotion from the line into the narration, when it should live inside the dialogue.

Rule 5. Same logic for exclamation points: use them sparingly. Leonard was willing to allow two or three per 100,000 words.

These are guides, not commandments. But the common sense is massive: read any beginner manuscript and it's almost always the variety of dialogue tags and the adverbs that give the anxious writer away. "Said" is transparent; the reader moves past it without seeing it. That's exactly what you want from a dialogue attribution — invisibility.

Action beats: replacing tags with a gesture

Once you've cut the tags back to "said" or "asked", there's another option: the action beat. Instead of "I warned you," he said coldly, you can write "I warned you." He pushed his plate away. The gesture replaces the tag, tells the reader who's speaking, and characterizes the emotion without labeling it.

Beats do three useful things:

• They ground the scene in space. Disembodied dialogue ("talking heads", in screenwriter shorthand) leaves the reader drifting. A beat reminds us that the characters are in a kitchen, a car, a forest.
• They pace. A tag speeds you up, a beat slows you down. Alternating the two is how you control the tempo of an exchange.
• They characterize. How a character holds a cigarette, how they interrupt themselves to check their phone, how they look away before answering — all of that says who they are, often more effectively than an adjective.

Don't overdo it: a beat on every line turns mechanical fast. Use one every three or four exchanges, when you want to mark a turn or re-ground the geography of the scene.

What to cut from a dialogue

If we had to boil down what Hemingway, Carver, and Leonard share, it would be this: cut everything you can cut. Specifically:

• The hellos and introductions. "Hi Mark, how's it going? — Fine thanks, you?" You can almost always enter the conversation two lines later.
• The politeness markers that carry nothing ("I just wanted to say", "you know", "kind of").
• The reply that restates what the previous character just said.
• The explanations that repeat what the reader already understood.
• The exposition-dialogue where one character tells another things they both already know ("As you know, my brother Paul, who's a cardiologist in Boston..."). Robert McKee calls this the "as you know, Bob" problem and recommends dramatization in its place: show the information rather than have it said.

A dialogue that's been cut three times is almost never worse than its first draft.

Test your dialogue: read it aloud

The last rule is the most obvious and the most effective: read your dialogue aloud. Not with your eyes, not in your head — out loud, articulating the words.

Listen for:

• Lines that run too long. In real speech people cut each other off, trail off, interrupt themselves. A six-sentence speech that ends neatly on a period is almost always too long.
• Phrasings your mouth can't navigate. If you stumble, your character will too.
• Identical rhythms. When two characters use the same sentence length and syntax, they share a voice — which is to say, neither has one.
• Inconsistent registers. A character who says "I ain't going" in one scene and "I'm not going" in the next, for no dramatic reason.

Actors preparing a play work through every line aloud. Novelists should do the same. It's slow, it's tedious, and there's no substitute for it.

Dialogue and organizing the manuscript

A novel that's dialogue-heavy requires specific organization. Tracking ten characters across thirty chapters is bookkeeping work, especially when you're writing over months or years. For fiction, two tools help in practice:

• Character mentions. Tagging every appearance with a @character (via the mention system in the editor) lets you filter every scene where a given character speaks, check the consistency of their voice across the manuscript, and catch the moments where they say "I'm not going" three chapters after saying "I ain't going".
• Slash commands. Once you notice you keep writing tense dialogue scenes, a reusable template (inserted with /) means you don't rebuild the same skeleton each time — two characters, a setting, an implicit stake, a dialogue, a closing beat.

These tools don't replace the writing. They just cut the friction that makes you postpone the scene you already know will be hard.

Takeaways

Writing dialogue means trusting what you leave out. Three reference points:

1. Hemingway — know what's happening under the waterline, and don't write it.
2. Carver — cut half of the first draft. Then cut again.
3. Le Carré — ask what each character is hiding. That's what will make them speak.

For everything else — tags, adverbs, beats — Leonard's rules hold. They're not laws; they're guides that good writers break knowingly, and that beginners would do well to follow for three or four manuscripts before allowing themselves exceptions.

Good dialogue is dialogue you can read aloud without flinching. The rest is time and revision.

For more on narrative construction around dialogue, see our guide for fiction writers and our articles on opening a novel and show, don't tell.